Bass-baritone Mark S. Doss (center) as Créon and the Messenger, with (left) William Burden as Oedipus and Ethan Burck as the Shepherd in Opera Philadelphia's production of Oedipus Rex Friday in Verizon Hall. Corrado Rovaris conducts. (Dominic M. Mercier)
by David Patrick Stearns, For The Inquirer
January 22, 2022
Exactly 720 days had passed since Opera Philadelphia last performed for a live public — indoors — when the public filled 1,100 seats this frigid Friday for a double bill of less-than-familiar works in concert performances at the Kimmel Center.
Listeners must’ve been hungry for it. Both the elegiac George Walker song cycle Lilacs (which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize, a first for a Black composer) and Stravinsky’s opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex are more known about than heard, but were given full-tilt resources with an orchestra of 93 (far larger than what could fit in any local orchestra pit) under music director Corrado Rovaris.
It was very much a thinking person’s return to traditional performance: Lilacs deals with the death of Abraham Lincoln and Oedipus unfolds in the midst of plague.
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Walker’s Lilacs would seem to be straightforward with sensitive, adept vocal lines fashioned around Walt Whitman’s famous “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” showing the composer distilling the wide range of musical influences that he worked with during his long creative life.
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A livestream of the Friday concert can be accessed through Feb. 20 at https://www.operaphila.tv/featured-category/videos/oedipus-rex-lilacs
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